climate change
illconsidered | December 9, 2009The Guardian has run a front page editorial on the Copenhagen summit along with 56 papers in 20 languages.
I read it at Real Climate who "takes no formal position" on its statements. I suppose it is to avoid the acusation of being political...
Well, I have rarely read an editorial I agree with more. And I say that with the utmost formality!
It was released under Creative Commons license, so I will reproduce it here in its entirety:
Copenhagen climate change conference: Fourteen days to seal history's judgment on this generation
Today 56 newspapers in 45 countries take the unprecedented step…
hrynyshyn | December 9, 2009Dear Ms. Palin,
Re: "Copenhagen's political science" as published in the Washington Post. As the Post didn't see fit to edit or fact-check your piece, I thought I'd save you any embarrassment that might result if you see fit to publish it elsewhere.
I will begin with this paragraph:
The e-mails reveal that leading climate "experts" deliberately destroyed [deleted copies of] records, manipulated adjusted data to "hide the decline" in global select North American temperatures [tree-ring proxy data that conflicted with observational records], and tried to silence [challenge] their [non-expert]…
illconsidered | December 8, 2009greenman has done a fine job of debunking the various exagerations, misrepresentations and lies circulating about the recent Swiftwacking of CRU (aka Climategate).
I recommend having a look, below:
hrynyshyn | December 8, 2009I use the term "climategate" reluctantly because the stolen climatology email story has little in common with Watergate. Those who would deny the physical reality of climate change seem to have latched onto the meme, however, and it is my sad news to report that the essence of the meme, if not that particular label, is spreading further than I originally feared. The latest casualty is Canada's Globe and Mail.
Reporter Doug Saunders is no intellectual slouch. I've followed his work for a while now. He has proven his ability to cut through prevailing dogma -- replacing the myth that Ronald…
sastyk | December 8, 2009Last year I was invited to speak at a Green Energy Event in the West. Most such events make their actual money from their vendor halls, and this one had as one of its focal events the premier of the new Ford Hybrid, which was just being released. Thus, there were many Ford executives at the event. I arrived early to the drinks-and-food-for-the-speakers-and-vendors bit the night before the event formally began, since I had been told it would take longer for me to walk there than it did, and the only other person present from the event was a Ford executive. We got to talking - he was a…
hrynyshyn | December 7, 2009William "Stoat" Connolley draws our attention to a couple of essays by Mike Hulme of the University of East Anglia climate team on the role of climatologists -- and scientists in general -- in the policy-making process. I have to agree with William, it's not exactly clear just what Hulme is getting at. Some excellent points are raised, though, and the essays are worthwhile fodder for thought as the Copenhagen conference begins.
Hulme may be a fine scientist, indeed one of the best, but I have trouble following his line of reasoning on this subject in both the Wall Street Journal and the BBC…
hrynyshyn | December 4, 2009 Science as a Contact Sport:
Inside the battle to save Earth's climate
by Stephen Schneider
National Geographic, 295 pages
Not even Stephen Schneider could have anticipated how timely his new book, Science as a Contact Sport: Inside the battle to save Earth's climate, would be. The histrionics generated by the theft and publication of the UEA emails suggests climatology is much rougher than even Australian rules football.
Schneider was one of the first climatologists to understand the need to communicate what his research was showing with the general public. He appears in documentaries back…
hrynyshyn | December 2, 2009A two-hour PowerPoint/Keynote presentation isn't enough time to explain the science of climate change, the political forces governing our response to it, and the economics involving in reducing greehouse gas-emissions. Oversimplification is an unavoidable hazard. Just imagine how much trouble you're going to get into if you try to compress all that into 10 minutes? Is it even possible to make a meaningful contribution in such a format?
Annie Leonard's new short feature making the rounds of the net this week, The Story of Cap Trade, clocks in at 9:56. So you know there's going to be complaints…
illconsidered | December 1, 2009Well, I see no one takes my advice on anything!
The Associated Press
LONDON -- Britain's University of East Anglia says the director of its prestigious Climatic Research Unit is stepping down pending an investigation into allegations that he overstated the case for man-made climate change.
The university says Phil Jones will relinquish his position until the completion of an independent review into allegations that he worked to alter the way in which global temperature data was presented.
The allegations were made after more than a decade of correspondence between leading British and U.S.…
hrynyshyn | November 30, 2009Maybe I've just been at this too long. But it seems that the ratio between banal observations and helpful analyses of the climate crisis is much larger than usual. I mean, I was offline for five days over Thanksgiving and apparently missed nothing. Consider this conclusion from Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, writing in Yale's 360:
First, climate change seems tailor-made to be a low priority for most people. The threat is distant in both time and space.
As Special Agent Gibbs might say: "Ya think?"
And over at Nature Climate Change Reports, an interview with NASA climatologist James…
hrynyshyn | November 25, 2009Well, that headline's a little unfair. I wrote it to lure in those who jump on every opportunity to prove that climatologists are frauds. What I really mean to say is: "Where the most recent assessment by the IPCC has been superceded by more recent findings.
It's all in a new report, The Copenhagen Diagnosis, assembled by some of the top people in the field. Here's the executive summary:
Surging greenhouse gas emissions: Global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels in 2008 were nearly 40% higher than those in 1990. Even if global emission rates are stabilized at present -day levels, just…
hrynyshyn | November 23, 2009One of the commenters to my last post, an attempt to explain why the hacked climatology emails do not constitute a scientific scandal, came up with a darn fine idea:
If you think that global warming rests on a few temperature data sets and models, you are very wrong. If you don't understand this then you don't know enough to have an opinion on the subject, and you most likely will be treated just like any other ineducable troll.
Grab a climate textbook and do some reading...it will help if you have some physics background too. Yeah, science takes effort...
I just happen to have at hand a…
hrynyshyn | November 20, 2009Much is being made by those who really, really believe that there's a global conspiracy among climatologists of the emails and other documents stolen from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit. According to such bloggers, thousands of "embarrassing" pieces of correspondence between some of the leading climate researchers in the world now lay bare the scheme to mislead humanity about the nature of climate change.
I downloaded the 62 MB file and took a quick look at a random selection of what are mostly dull little missives bereft of the context required to understand them in…
hrynyshyn | November 20, 2009I promise to get back to substantive blogging shortly, but in the meantime, if you've got three minutes to tear yourself away from coverage of Sarah Palin's book:
Scientifically sound? Not the words I would use, but not too far off the mark, either. Hyperbolic? Yes. Offensive? To some. Provocative? Absolutely. Greenpeace and the Agit-Pop gang know how to grab your attention. If, that is, you already care about preserving what's left of the planet's ability to host civilization as we know it.
edyong | November 19, 2009
Around 15,000 years ago, North American was home to a wide menagerie of giant mammals - mammoths and mastodons, giant ground sloths, camels, short-faced bears, American lions, dire wolves, and more. But by 10,000 years ago, these "megafauna" had been wiped out. Thirty-four entire genera went extinct, including every species that weighed over a tonne, leaving the bison as the continent's largest animal.
In trying to explain these extinctions, the scientific prosecution has examined suspects including early human hunters, climate change and even a meteor strike. But cracking the case has…
hrynyshyn | November 12, 2009A fascinating paper about to be published in Geophysical Review Letters compares the number of record highs and lows at temperature stations across the U.S. since the 1940s. The authors found that we're getting more record highs and fewer record lows, in a pattern that yet again confirms that climatologists know what they're talking about. They also extrapolate that trend into the future, with some interesting results, but first let's deal with the past.
Gerald A. Meehl*, Claudia Tebaldi, Guy Walton, David Easterling and Larry McDaniel analysed millions of U.S. temperature records for the…
hrynyshyn | November 10, 2009In an otherwise typically error-dominated Newsweek column, George F. Will spelled "minuscule" correctly. So I don't want to read any complaints that Will gets everything wrong each time he writes about climate change.
Of course, that doesn't mean we can't correct his myriad other mistakes. Here's one paragraph, with some necessary edits, just to get us started.
There is much an unremarkable level of debate about the reasons for, and the importance of, the fact that global warming has not increased continued for that long [11 years]. What we know is that computer models did not did predict…
hrynyshyn | November 9, 2009Climate Cover-Up
The Crusade to Deny Global Warming
Greystone Books, 250 pages
Canadian public relations agent James "DeSmogBlog" Hoggan has assembled a comprehensive history of corporate efforts to stall action on climate change in a modest little book that should shock and appall anyone who's been living under a rock for the past three decades. For the rest of us, Climate Cover-Up offers few new details. It still serves, however, as a convenient hard-copy reference manual for when the Internet is down and you need a rejuvenating jolt of outrage to help you decide which companies to boycott…
hrynyshyn | November 4, 2009(Pseudo)-Skeptical Environmental Bjorn Lomborg advises in the Wall Street Journal that spending money on anti-malarial campaigns makes more sense than, and by implication is morally superior to, spending money on cutting carbon emissions. But to make his case, he has to abandon all hope of ever being invited to join the Vulcan Science Academy.
It may be true that every dollar we spend combating the vectors of malaria and the treatments for it will save more lives than those who would be spared the disease if we spend it instead on avoiding catastrophic global warming. But Lomborg is abandons…
hrynyshyn | October 30, 2009Rarely does a blogging day pass that I don't stumble upon some post or comment or email that champions the value of skepticism of anthropogenic global warming and the need for scientists to answer their critics. So it's refreshing to read a concise and cogent reminder of why such attacks are misguided. From UBC's Simon Donner we get this rejoinder, made in reference to demands that real-climatologist Michael "hockey stick" Mann answer the criticism of non-climatologist Steve McIntyre
Think of it this way: wouldn't you rather that doctors spend their time actually developing treatments for…